blasphemy law

By Omar R Quraishi Social media increasingly seems to be setting the mainstream agenda these days and no more so than in Pakistan, which has around 30 million Facebook users and around 3-5 million who have accounts on Twitter. Events, especially those captured on video and then uploaded on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, quickly reach

ISLAMABAD, March 7 – A little-known alliance of hundreds of lawyers in Pakistan is behind the rise in prosecutions for blasphemy, a crime punishable by death that goes to the heart of an ideological clash between reformers and religious conservatives. The group, whose name translates as The Movement for the Finality of the Prophethood, offers

By Omar R Quraishi Mumtaz Qadri was a member of an elite police detachment tasked with guarding important people in the Pakistan government. On January 4, 2011, while deployed in the security detail of then Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer he pumped 28 bullets into his body in an affluent neighborhood of the country’s capital Islamabad. He immediately